On the Rise
Mei Semones

Having started piano lessons at four years old, some of her earliest memories are of practising at home with her mother, on a piano bought by her grandma. At 11, she switched to playing guitar, keen to learn her favourite ‘90s rock songs by bands like Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, but high school led her into “a great jazz programme” where she developed an instinct for improvisation and self-expression.

These days the 24-year-old is based in Brooklyn, having graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2022, signed to Bayonet Records, and about to release her debut album Animaru, which takes its name from the pronunciation of アニマル, a Japanese word for ‘animal’. Drawing from her wealth of influences, the album ranges freely from jazz and bossa nova to indie-rock and lushly orchestrated pop, and everywhere in between. Life-loving lead single “Dumb Feeling” cycles through all of those in just a few minutes, seamlessly blending English and Japanese lyrics and allowing her sweetly lilting vocals to shine through.

With so much going on in her songs, some might view Semones as a challenge, even a hard sell, but where does she think her sound fits into things? “When people ask that I normally describe it as jazz-influenced, indie-J-pop,” she says, “which is a long title but I don’t know how to make it any shorter.” Animaru is full of juxtaposed sounds that audiences might not automatically think would go together, particularly on the ambitious “I Can Do What I Want” and “Dangomushi”, which jumps from soft to loud with ease and sums up nicely just how unique her songs and sonic palette feels.

Encouraged by her high school teacher, Semones’ love of jazz began with listening to Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, and Sonny Rollins (“the classic stuff that everyone listens to”), eventually moving into a more contemporary space. Some of her current favourites are the late saxophonist Michael Brecker and percussionist Ari Hoenig. “Zarigani”, a song for her twin sister, feels especially rooted in jazz, rhythmically, and with heavy use of strings.

“Jazz has always been loved by people,” she says, downplaying the idea that the genre has exploded in popularity over the past decade, for example through the likes of Ezra Collective and Laufey. “For me, it’s always been the music that I listen to, and always the music that I've been passionate about since I was a young teenager. So when people say, ‘Oh it's coming back,’ I think it's always been there.”

Growing up in the American Midwest in the 2000s, one might expect a certain emo influence to appear in Semones’ music, and she says she’s often told by people that they do hear it. “I get that a lot, and I think I can also hear it, in a way,” she adds. “I don’t know if that’s from growing up in Michigan, really. At school in Boston, I had some friends around me in bands that had that type of sound, and bands with more of a math-rock sound. So, if those two things influenced me, I think it came more from friends in Boston than from actually growing up in Michigan."

It was in Boston that Semones wrote her first bilingual song, in both Japanese and English, and she recognises that moment as “a big part” of finding her sound and “figuring out what I wanted to sound like as an artist.” While she says it has always felt pretty natural to her to shift from one tongue to the other, the process has become almost totally frictionless, “going with the flow of the music.”

“When I first started writing songs in both languages, I would section it off so that one verse would be in Japanese, and then a chorus would be in English, and so on, section by section,” she adds. “But now, within the same section or even within the same sentence, I’ll switch languages. It has to do with whatever feels right for the music, and what fits best rhythmically too. If one word doesn't fit well in English, then maybe that same word in Japanese will fit better. I like piecing things together that way.”

Animaru arrives three years on from Semones’ first two EPs, Tsukino and Sukikirai, and follows last year’s Kabutomushi, which caught the attention of Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, who described it as “deft, articulate, and [carrying] a mysterious power.” “I’m very flattered and very happy that he’s a fan,” she says, smiling, “It means a lot. He’s such an influential musician throughout the whole world – even the bassist in my band was inspired to play bass because of Flea. It’s a really gratifying experience to be recognised by someone that you look up to so much. It’s encouraging.”

With such emphatic support and a growing self-assurance from immersing herself in music full-time, Semones approached the making of Animaru in a completely different way from her earlier recordings. This time, the band were all recording in the same space rather than building the songs layer by layer over long distances, and it sounds more cohesive and more alive as a result. Her songwriting style was more deliberate too, she tells me. “I’ve been homing in on the songwriting, developing it more and going deeper into it,” she explains. “The songs on the EPs have bossa elements with math-rock and indie-rock, and the album is like that too, but I would say that it’s more pinpointed within each song.”